Recently Added Articles Page #123

surrogate - vocabulary

nounA person appointed to act for another, a deputy; a substitute; a surrogate mother. In law, in some states, a surrogate is a judicial officer charged with probating wills and administering estates.As an adjective, regarded as, or acting as, a surr...

sycophant - vocabulary

nounA servile flatterer, especially of those in authority or influence; a fawning parasite. Your future connection with Britain, whom you can neither love nor honour, will be forced and unnatural, and being formed only on the plan of present convenie...

tableau - vocabulary

nounA picture, of a scene; a vivid description; an arrangement of inanimate figures representing a scene from real life, all costumed and posed. In a play, a time in a scene when all actors freeze and then resume the action. The simple tableau is so ...

tacit - vocabulary

adjectiveUnderstood, without being expressed; implied, as in a tacit agreement; silent, as in a tacit partner. In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common natur...

taciturn - vocabulary

adjectiveDisinclined to conversation; reserved in speech; not talkative. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.—Paul Klee The Diaries of Paul Klee (1965)...

tangible - vocabulary

adjectivePerceptible by touch; material or substantial; real, actual, not imaginary, not vague.Note: A tangible asset is something you can see and touch and, you hope, sell. Examples include gold bars, silver coins, houses, and land. “Collecting as...

tantamount - vocabulary

adjectiveEquivalent to (but not the same as), amounts to, might as well be the same as. Most women of [the World War II] generation have but one image of good motherhood—the one their mothers embodied. . . . Anything done “for the sake of the ...

temerity - vocabulary

nounRecklessness, boldness, rashness; fearless daring. The old man trusts wholly to slow contrivance and gradual progression; the youth expects to force his way by genius, vigour, and precipitance. The old man pays regard to riches, and the youth rev...

temporize - vocabulary

verbTo gain time or delay acting by being indecisive or evasive; to comply with the time or the occasion, to yield ostensibly to current opinion; to produce a compromise; to come to terms. The third European peace is within reach and the fourth can b...

tenacious - vocabulary

adjectiveUnyielding, holding fast, keeping a firm grip, stubborn, obstinate. Isabel was perfectly aware that she had not taken the measure of Pansy’s tenacity, which might prove to be inconveniently great; but she inclined to think the young girl w...

tenet - vocabulary

nounAn opinion, principle, dogma, or doctrine a person or group believes or maintains as true. A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that “all women are oppressed.” This assertion implies that women share a common lot,...

therefore, therefor - vocabulary

adverbTherefore: serves as a conjunctive adverb or as a regular adverb. When it joins two clauses, it must be preceded by a semicolon and followed by a comma: The court upheld the lower court; therefore, the appellant lost once again. When it serves ...

torpor - vocabulary

nounApathy, sluggish inactivity, a state of suspended physical activity, lethargic indifference. Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.—William Cobbet...

tortious, tortuous, torturous - vocabulary

adjectiveTortious: a legal word that refers to an act that gives ground for a lawsuit based on tort law.Note: The words torturous and tortuous come from the same Latin root “torquere,” which means “to twist.” But their meanings today are dist...

tractable - vocabulary

adjectiveEasily led or controlled, as in a tractable child or tractable voters. The parole board scene, like many other sequences here, attests to the filmmakers' skill at unobtrusively entering the prisoners' world and at avoiding trite, melodramati...

transitive verb - vocabulary

nounNote: The transitive verb is a good thing to know. Because many experienced writers usually know its ins and outs, I’ve included a brief discussion here.Here’s an excerpt from the Parts of Speech section of Grammar.com:Verbs with ObjectsAs Am...

travail - vocabulary

nounHard or agonizing labor, painfully difficult work; anguish or suffering resulting from physical or mental hardship; also, the pain of childbirth. Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.—Henry David T...

travesty - vocabulary

nounA burlesque of a serious work characterized by grotesque incompatibility of style of the original; a grotesque imitation, as in a travesty of justice.Note: Though travesty is often used to mean “a gross injustice,” perhaps from the popular sa...

trepidation - vocabulary

nounNervous uncertainty of feeling; tremulous alarm, fear; quivering movement. Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect of meet...

truculent - vocabulary

adjectiveFiercely brutal, cruel, vitriolic, scathing, belligerent. The past is present everywhere, but Japan is an unusually history-haunted nation. Elsewhere the Cold War is spoken of in the past tense. Japan, however, lives in a dangerous neighborh...

ubiquitous - vocabulary

adjectiveBeing present everywhere, omnipresent. Hardly a section of the country, urban or rural, has escaped the ubiquitous presence of ragged, ill and hallucinating human beings, wandering through our city streets, huddled in alleyways or sleeping o...

umbrage - vocabulary

nounA sense of injury, annoyance, offense, injury; vague feel of doubt or suspicion; leaves affording shade, shade, or shadows cast by trees. Mr. Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very warmly, I believed; and with an air of languid patronage, ...

unctuous - vocabulary

adjectiveCharacterized by excessive moralistic fervor, especially in an affected manner; excessively smooth or smug; characteristic of an unguent or oil, oily, greasy; abundant in organic material, as in unctuous soil. Congress—these, for the most ...

unique - vocabulary

adjectiveBeing the only one of its kind.Note: Be careful and refrain from using adverbs to modify unique, such as very unique, the most unique, extremely unique. Unique means unique. One exception: almost unique.But consider this contrary view from D...

upbraid - vocabulary

verbTo reproach, to find fault, to criticize harshly. I have never worked for fame or praise, and shall not feel their loss as I otherwise would. I have never for a moment lost sight of the humble life I was born to, its small environments, and the c...